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Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

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Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#281

Post by dajtxx »

overfeed wrote: post #196
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not talking about an overworked nurse. Same Facebook-AI-researcher-pay is likely an eye watering amount of money

> We’re not talking about an overworked nurse. We're talking about overworked AI engineers and researchers who've been berated for management failures and told they need to do 5x more (before today). The money isn't just handed out for slacking, it's in exchange for an eye-watering amount of work, and now more is expected of them.

Still not feeling any sympathy. These people are actively working to make society worse.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#282

Post by LunaSea »

renewiltord wrote: post #178
asadotzler wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they shouldn't have hired and put so many cooks in the kitchen. Treating workers like pawns is wild and you should not be normalizing the idea that it's OK for Big Tech to hire up thousands, find out they don't need them, and lay them off to be replaced by the next batch of thousands by the next leader trying to build an empire within the company. Treating this as SOP is a disservice to your industry and everyo…

No, I'm totally fine with it. No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired and I'd rather they overshoot than undershoot because some law stops it. This means that now some people were employed who would not otherwise be employed. That's spending by Meta that goes to people.

> No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired

Overshooting by 600 people sounds a lot like gross failure. Is someone going to take responsibilities for it? Probably not. That person's job is safe.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#283

Post by munk-a »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #8
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't? > ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios. That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.

I just assume they over hired. Too much hype for AI. Everyone wants to build the framework people use for AI nobody wants to build the actual tools that make AI useful.

My voice activated egg timer is amazing. There are millions of useful small tools that can be built to assist us in a day-to-day manner... I remain skeptical that anyone will come up with a miracle tool that can wholesale replace large sections of the labor market and I think that too much money is chasing after huge solutions where many small products will provide the majority of the gains we're going to get from this bubble.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#284

Post by doctorwho42 »

monkeynotes wrote: post #136
throwacct wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's a path to "profitability", isn't it?

Hardly, they are burning money with TikSlop, they don't even know how to monetize it, just YOLO'd the product to keep investors interested. Even the porn industry can't seem to monetize AI, so I doubt OpenAI who knows jack shit about this space will be able to. Fact is generative AI is stupidly expensive to run, and I can't see mass adoption at subscription prices that actually allow them to break even. I'm sure folk…

> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.

Thats the thing, they arent looking at the big picture or long term. They are looking to get a slice of the pie after seeing companies like Tesla and Uber milk the market for billions. In a market where everything from shelter to food is blowing up in cost, people struggle to provide/have a life similar to their parents.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#285

Post by zamadatix »

impossiblefork wrote: post #159
deanc wrote: post #107

Meta is fumbling hard. Winning the AI race is about marketing at this point - the difference between the models is negligible. Chat GPT is the one on everyone's lips outside of technology, and in the media. They have a platform by which to push some kind of assistant but where is it? I log into facebook and it's buried in the sidebar as Meta AI. Why aren't they shoving it down my throat? They have a huge platform of…

Surely winning the AI race is finding secret techniques that allow development of superior models, with it not being apparent that anyone has anything special enough that he actually is winning? I think there's some firms with special knowledge: Google, possibly OpenAI/Anthropic, possibly the Chinese firms, possibly Mistral too, but no one has enough unique stuff to really stand out. The biggest things were those six…

I think that depends on how optimistic/pessimistic one is on how much more superior the models are going to get. If you're really pessimistic then there isn't all too much one company could do to be 2x or more ahead already. If you're really optimistic then it doesn't matter what anyone is doing today because it's about who finds the next 100x leap.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#286

Post by roadside_picnic »

djmips wrote: post #55
mikert89 wrote: post #7

Guaranteed this is them cleaning out the old guard, its either axe them, or watch a brutal political game between legacy employees and new LLM AI talent

Fortunately there's probably a lot of opportunity for those 600 out there.

While ex-FAIR people should have little problem finding a job, the market for paying research folks that level of TC and working on ambitious research projects, unless you're in a very-LLM specific space, is absolutely shrinking.

It certainly feels like the end of an era to see Meta increasingly diminishing the role of FAIR. Strategically it might not have been ideal for LeCun to be so openly and aggressively critical of the this current generation of AI (even if history will very likely prove him correct).

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#287

Post by doctorwho42 »

JTbane wrote: post #99
electric_mayhem wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only a matter of time before corporations are run by AI. Add that to “corporate personhood” and what do we get?

It's funny to think that the C-suite would ever give up their massive compensation packages.

They arent a monolith. They would gladly sacrifice n number of c-suites they dont know, if it increased their networth by 1%.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#289

Post by impossiblefork »

zamadatix wrote: post #285
impossiblefork wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely winning the AI race is finding secret techniques that allow development of superior models, with it not being apparent that anyone has anything special enough that he actually is winning? I think there's some firms with special knowledge: Google, possibly OpenAI/Anthropic, possibly the Chinese firms, possibly Mistral too, but no one has enough unique stuff to really stand out. The biggest things were those six…

I think that depends on how optimistic/pessimistic one is on how much more superior the models are going to get. If you're really pessimistic then there isn't all too much one company could do to be 2x or more ahead already. If you're really optimistic then it doesn't matter what anyone is doing today because it's about who finds the next 100x leap.

I don't think it does.

The models have increased greatly in capabilities, but the competitors have simply kept up, and it's not apparently that they won't continue to do that. Furthermore, the breakthroughs-- i.e. fundamentally better models, can happen anywhere where people can and do try out new architectures, and that can happen in surprisingly small places.

It's mostly about culture and being willing to experiment on something which is often very thankless since most radical ideas do not give an improvement.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#290

Post by lolive »

ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't? > ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios. That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.

Can that guy come to my company and axe all those middle managers that plague the global efficiency?
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